I haven't written here about Qt before, but I've been playing with it for the last four or five months. I saw the announcement yesterday about Qt 4.6 and a new version of Qt Creator (the IDE for Qt), and I had to try it. And I have to say, it is excellent.

I've been working on a new app, and I wanted to give everybody a sneak peak just to show that Lazarus is not, in fact dead. This is just a screen mockup, but it lets you see where my head is for my new UI.Adventure Designer default screen

This is the presentation for the Network and Security presentation.

A potential customer asked me for a demo of how to use the registration and serial library in a GUI app. To give a decent approximation of how an application might work, I created a serial number generator that encodes the customer number, software expiration date, and program options in the serial number.

Registration FormThere's also something akin to a program registration form. When the proper serial number is entered, it will display the program options, expiration date and customer number.

A simple SQL Backup utility which puts each backup into a logically named file. SQL Backup simplifies creating and managing SQL Server Backups.

If you are shipping an application that uses SQL Server, this is an ideal utility to include. You can configure automatic backups from inside your NSIS script. Your customers get peace of mind and you get a lot fewer panicked calls when the customer's database crashes.

I've been doing a lot of work with Drupal lately. I've known about views in the past, knew that they could let you filter on information in a simple way. What I didn't realize was just how powerful they can be, and I'm pretty sure I haven't really scratched the surface.

A colleague recently ran into the problem of not being able to write large chunks of data into a text field using SQL Server. This happens because there is an 8k limit on data chunks in SQL Server. For straight ODBC users this isn't that hard to deal with, just send the data in streaming mode. If you use Delphi though, you access ODBC via the BDE based components, and the BDE doesn't do streaming mode. You could, of course, rewrite the application to use ADO for data access, and that shouldn't take more than a few months.

In a move that shows the power of Drupal, the same package I use to manage this site and to set up customer sites, Scribus has moved their website management to Drupal. Why don't you drop me a line to see what Drupal can do for you?

More details here: http://www.scribus.net/?q=news/20080505_wwwtodrupal

A better question is probably what can't you do? Drupal is easily one of the most extensible content management systems available. Rather than try to make an exhaustive list, let me provide you with a few examples of what I have done with Drupal. I'm sure you can extrapolate from these and come up with your own ideas.

E-Commerce

For those of you who didn't catch the news, first I updated the installer for the bulk loader so that it actually included the program. Seemed like a nice thing to do. Right now it's just a zip file, but give me a little bit and I'll make it back into a program installer. More importantly, I've been busy working on the ability to capture and recreate the database schema as well.